Rather, the X-Rite on-line color challenge to see how well you perceive color. I was reading through Jeff's tome on color printing and encountered a link to this test, which is fun and pretty interesting. I scored well, which cheered me up. However, you should probably take it on your largest, most-stable screen; I took it on a laptop and every time I moved, the screen, the colors changed a bit (although not my perception of their correct order)... It's here: http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge

NOTE: your ability to score well in this test is very much dependent on your monitor. I first did this test on a laptop, didn't score so well, then did it at my desktop (with a better screen) and the score was similarly much better.

So this isn't only a test of your ability to perceive colour but also of your monitor's ability to display colour.

NOTE: your ability to score well in this test is very much dependent on your monitor. I first did this test on a laptop, didn't score so well, then did it at my desktop (with a better screen) and the score was similarly much better.

So this isn't only a test of your ability to perceive colour but also of your monitor's ability to display colour.

In my case the monitor doesn't make much difference at all. I've known for almost sixty years that my own color vision is of the variety that is commonly referred to as "red-green color blindness." The Ishihara color vision tests verify the difference between "normal" and "deficient" color vision very simply and quickly. It turns out that those of us with my kind of color vision tend to make distinctions first in terms of brightness (contrast) and only secondarily in terms of hue.

I tried the X-Rite test just out of curiosity, using a pretty good calibrated monitor, and had a very hard time sorting out the patches, ending up with a humongous score.

That's why I do most of my work in B&W, only using color in abstract images where the accuracy of the color doesn't matter.

Curiously, they list the scores as 0 being the best and 99 being the worst, but when I plugged in my age and gender group, they said that the best score for my gender group was -160 and the worst was 9999996. These numbers really don't fit between 0 and 99, do they?

I did this test on my calibrated macbook pro laptop (pre-retina) and scored 19 which according to my age of 39 was very good.

Did the test again on my mac pro with calibrated NEC SpectaView 27" monitor and got a perfect score and the test took half the time (someone please call the president ) So I think a huge caveat needs to be put on this test that the quality of the monitor makes a massive difference to your end result.

I would use it in a broad sense to see if you suffer from some sort of color deficiency rather than gauging how 'good' your eyes really are.

I took the test on my cr@ppy but calibrated BenQ 17" monitor. Scored 8 which is not too bad for a 48 year old man with middle aged eyes. Then I got my 13 year old daughter to take the test and she got a perfect 0. Any career suggestions for someone with perfect colour vision?

I took the test on my cr@ppy but calibrated BenQ 17" monitor. Scored 8 which is not too bad for a 48 year old man with middle aged eyes. Then I got my 13 year old daughter to take the test and she got a perfect 0. Any career suggestions for someone with perfect colour vision?

You probably know by now that in general women tend to have much better color discrimination than men.

PS. Although I tend to do better on these color tests than my wife (I got a 0 here using a calibrated 27" HP)